Though reformist conservatives, taking their cue from Britons like Benjamin Disraeli, have welcomed the rise of Cameronism anyway, American conservatives opposed to reform – at least in its more government-friendly but socially libertarian guise – have found new hope in a different variety of the British right. If Cameronism promises a radical revamp of conservative social thinking, to use Phillip Blond's schema in the Prospect, red Toryism offers a roots-deep rethink of the right's late-modern love affair with the unfettered free market.

Traditionalist critics of market capitalism have long fit poorly into America's zero-sum ideological game. Though their attitudes about the federal government and sexual ethics might differ, they are broadly united in an understanding that the local and family life championed by the right is undermined and corrupted by the atomising, exploitative power of the global market. For conservatives who agree, red Toryism is a light in the dark around which a long, if marginalised, alternate tradition in American politics can assemble and even thrive.

Although red Toryism can provide a useful corrective to the more irrational exuberance of pro-market partisanship, alternate-tradition conservatives in America would do wrong to hope to lead a new coalition on the right broad enough to rule. This is less the result of an all-powerful market than of the all-powerful character of democracy in America – driven, as Alexis de Tocqueville brilliantly described, by a love of equality that runs deeper than America's mere preference for liberty.

Paradoxically, conservatives of the alternate tradition long for societies that are more equal because they are more noble. Citizens in such a society view the self as both whole and dependent, connected by sacred ties of mutual obligation and affection with fellow church members, citizens and neighbours – not just self-selected friends and one's nuclear family.

Critics since Nietzsche have long complained that the logic of the Christian faith destroys nobility (taking the love of equality even past the tolerance of traditional Christians themselves). But Tocquevillean conservatives recognise in Christianity an enduring aristocratic inheritance – one that views many of the lifestyles, values, and habits of consumption that flourish in a free market as lowering and corrosive of the dignity that befits humans living the good life.

Tocqueville also recognised, however, that the logic or psychology of equality made Americans physically and mentally restless – seeking to rise from obscurity and secure material enjoyments in a society where relationships, and fortunes, were constantly made and undone. For Tocqueville, money is the measure of all things in a democracy because the logic of equality rejects noble, hierarchical, measures of value. The challenge facing would-be red state Tories is simple: How can a movement based around ennobled community life function as anything other than a retreat from American life? And if there's an answer, how are Americans to be, well, sold on it?

It's a high bar to clear. Mike Huckabee's campaign for president was fiercely lampooned and attacked for offering European-style social democracy (from the right) or Christian democracy (from the left). In part, this is simply zero-sum ideological politics doing its work. Yet the drive to nationalise hot-button issues itself deprives America of the regional, geographical spaces needed to give red Toryism its due.

The alternative tradition seeks a social and political life that works best at a size bigger than a town and smaller than the United States. And, indeed, to function well, it requires a geographically contiguous, culturally homogenous, fertile landmass, the size of a modest American state. Yet cabining off such a region in America remains a tenuous proposition at best, and not even a state just the size of England works quite the way as England. The freedoms of movement and personal reinvention at the heart of the American dream are often fruitful coping mechanisms for the stifling and dissatisfying character of being just one of the many. They are also the great drivers of the American free market.

At root, the experimental regionalism the alternate tradition needs demands more than a broad distaste for consumerism and the strip mall. It means decoupling the very ideas of the free market and the good life. Alas, the psychology of equality in American life makes that division almost impossible.

For these reasons, conservatives shouldn't think red Toryism is likely to take root and flourish in America. But they should be wary of the way in which Cameronism, in American hands, might become even more facile and superficial – simply another pop culture brand. Perhaps the real American promise of red Toryism is a different decoupling than the one alterna-cons expect. It may be that the consequences of market failure can orient Americans toward a more even distribution of scarcer resources. But not even that change is likely to work the deeper moral and cultural changes that the alternate tradition demands.

Rather than de-linking the free market from the good life, conservatives might emphasise the space between culture and politics. Communitarian thought often seeks to close this space, so civic life is a seamless blend of political and cultural relations. But the nationalisation of social issues in America has created a similarly seamless ideological landscape that forecloses public interest in reviving the alternative tradition. Putting space between national politics and regional or local cultures is essential to recovering real conservative alternatives. Amid the current climate of exhaustion and anxiety on the right, that's a prospect all American conservatives should welcome.